Women

With the advent of electronic health records, medical data has become much more accessible to everyone, including criminals.

The Ponemon Institute’s National Study on Medical Identity Theft found “The number of data breaches among healthcare organizations is still growing – eroding patient privacy and contributing to medical identity theft”.

The Report also claims the average cost to resolve medical identity theft is a whopping $20,663 per victim.

All employers offering health insurance need to be mindful that they too can lose medical information even if they aren’t considered to be a medical provider. Health insurance policy numbers as well as any confidential data used to fill out a health insurance application is considered to be medical information.

Be sure you have adequate cyber insurance coverage and that your company is in compliance with the federal and state privacy & security/data breach laws.

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Come on American Women … get with the program!  Forbes reports identity theft can happen to anyone … The crime is far more likely when that “anyone” is a woman.

A study released by the fraud-tracking firm Javelin Research showed that women are 26% more likely than men to be the victims of identity theft.  And women took far longer on average to discover their financial identities had been compromised, leading to far greater risk of repeat fraud: Women took 83 days to detect they’d been targeted, compared with 45 days for men.

Men are statistically more likely than women to adopt newer technologies such as online banking and shopping. Women, because of their hesitance to adopt these new technologies, suffer from more old-fashioned fraud caused by stolen credit cards or retail employees. Fifty-eight percent of women, for instance, have never banked online, compared with 55% of men

It’s time for us women to enter the new millenium.  Check your banking accounts online several times a week.  Get yourself and your family ID Theft protection.

Read entire article

http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/09/security-privacy-internet-technology-security_0209_security_print.html

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